You Have the Wrong Man (27 page)

Bell discovered that a Navy friend had been reassigned to the Naval Underwater Systems Center in Newport, a good job in combat research and electromagnetics. The assignment came with a pretty duplex in relandscaped naval housing. Bell left messages for his friend, teasing him about his fat job, but none were returned. He thought he would drive over there, and he decided to take Christine and
Miller. Maybe they would be sandblasting a destroyer at Pier I and Christine could take a look at that. He drove his mother’s Buick and Christine pounded the center armrest closed so that they could all sit in front. Cracker crumbs and stale cookies sifted over the vinyl, and Bell wondered why his mother’s world was always defined by bread stuffs, a branny litter of sweets and biscuits.

Miller complained about the sweets and he teased Christine, accusing her of trying to tempt him.

“You can’t eat a cookie?” Bell asked Miller.

“It isn’t the best thing for Miller,” Christine said.

“If he wants a cookie, give him a cookie,” Bell said.

“Maybe he doesn’t want cupcakes and candies. Maybe he wants something else. What should I give him?” Christine was electrified, giggling each time Bell turned the wheel and his elbow knocked her. Women love to be centered between two men.

“You sure are on top of the world,” Bell told his sister.

Now and again, even with the motor humming, Bell heard a blip from Miller’s tummy pack.

He turned into Gate 17, but the MPs were checking stickers and wouldn’t let him come on base. An official Bronco tugged around the Buick and headed down the road leading to Coddington Cove, but Bell was directed to turn his car around.

Slow flushes bloomed and receded, bloomed again, starting at Bell’s throat and climbing over his cheekbones. He didn’t give the fellow his name or rank, or bother with explanations about his past connections with the Navy. He turned the car around and drove away. Christine cleared her throat. She tried one small apologetic cough to relieve a collective indignant feeling, but it didn’t help.

Miller said, “Anyone drives on base, what’s the problem, Bellamy?”

Of course it had nothing to do with Bell’s general discharge. There was probably some reason why they were sending people away. They might have the pot-sniffing dogs going around, or maybe they were spraying grass seed on the lots or painting the curbs. Bell told them, “Do we care? Do we need this crap?”

“Let’s forget it,” Christine said.

Miller said, “I don’t understand. Since when do they send people away?”

Christine tried to shush him, but he stopped on his own and fiddled with the lapels of her blouse. Bell tried to ignore Miller’s hands on his sister. It was jokey and innocent, but it irritated him when Miller went on for too long. He drove through town and stopped in the Almacs parking lot. He got out of the car and walked across to the CVS. He came back with the girl. She trotted behind him, removing her gray smock. She looked bewildered but pleased, shaking her head, letting her curls flop side to side. She scanned the parking lot to see who might acknowledge her. She was leaving her job for this impulsive, hotted-up guy, and it must look interesting. She told them she had been collecting the expired Easter cards from their Plexiglas bins, then sorting and inserting new cards for Mother’s Day.

She started right in. “I hate working the card display. It takes me forever. I have paper cuts. See these poor fingers? You know, the envelopes—they’re like fucking razors!”

Christine and Miller shifted to the backseat. The CVS girl took her place beside Bell. Bell revved the engine and thumbed the radio dial as everyone settled in. He turned
out of the parking lot onto Bellevue Avenue. “Well, what do you want to do?” he said, but he was just being polite.

“What about the Green Animals?” Christine said.

“Christine, how many years have you been going to see Green Animals? Every single year of your life, am I right?” Bell said.

“It’s beautiful there,” she told him.

The CVS girl said, “Are you talking about those sculpted bushes? I’ve never been up there to see those.”

“Forget it,” Bell said.

They drove past the famous mansions, most of them acquired by the Historical Society. Bell slowed the car as they approached the driveway where an heiress had steered a sedan over her chauffeur as he opened a gate. The murder location gave them a giddy surge as they left Bellevue’s heavy arbor and the street jogged onto Ocean Drive. They were out of the proper town and snaking up the shoreline. The sea’s white light washed through the windshield.

“Well? How many times have we driven out here? Only a zillion times,” Christine said to Bell, but her remark drifted. They were looking at the first glimpse of the sea at the turnaround at Bailey’s Beach. There was a strong, sweet scent coming in through the open window. It was the narcotic spell of early plankton blooming. The scent made his lust grow razory, his daydreams intensify, wavering through harsh stages of melancholy. Bell recited from his high school botany text, “The plankton bloom is a biological phenomenon having to do with chlorophyll and photosynthesis, a simple process impelled by the sun.” Yet, each season, Bell felt indirectly involved in the event,
as if the sea’s rejuvenation triggered second chances for everyone.

“A sign of spring,” Bell went on, trying to subdue an explosive coronary rhythm which started to crush the breath from him. The scent was so luscious, he rubbed his hand over his face as if dusting sugar from his lips.

“It intoxicates me,” Christine admitted to Miller. “You never think of the sea as a kind of garden, all floral like this.”

“It’s peaking,” Bell said, “like a thousand water lilies—”

“I don’t see lilies, where?” the CVS girl said. Miller leaned over the front seat and tapped her shoulder. She turned and shrugged in benign agreement. She wrinkled her nose once, puffed in and out, trying to track the scent that Bell was describing. “Everything smells like Giorgio to me,” she told them. “A lady was spritzing it on herself at the counter.”

They parked the car in the empty lot at the Beach Club, a private string of pastel cabanas still boarded up for the winter. There was a stiff wind, but the sun felt strong, falling in broad plackets of peachy light. The sand was extraordinarily hot for a day in mid-spring, and the heat rose to shin-level. They walked four abreast, the women in the middle.

“He basically
kidnapped
me!” the CVS girl told Christine.

“God, what did your boss say?”

“What was she going to say? Bell looked intense,” the girl said. “But I didn’t think we were going for a walk on the beach. I would have stayed where I was. I make four seventy-five. That’s an hour,” she confided to Christine, but she punched her small fist into Bell’s side, digging
her thumbnail into his ribs and cranking it a quarter-turn.

“Here,” Bell told them. He climbed onto a grouping of boulders and granite formations that made a natural breakwater into the sea. Giant ledges of rusty shale ascended like drunken stairways right and left. The surf sliced over the misshapen pillars and sloshed into its hollows, dragging ropes of effervescent foam. Sudsy lines extended far out. The water was so aerated, the place smelled of extra oxygen. A central configuration of rocks formed irregular bleachers around a deep chamber where the sea crashed inward, doubled its pressure, and shot upwards through a narrow fissure. The small opening was like a whale’s nostril. The place was called Spouting Rock, a local perch for teens who used its unpredictable force for threats and dares.

Christine sat down beside the blowhole. She rubbed her fingertips over its stony lip, inserting her pointer to the second knuckle. She looked distracted by something far out on the water as she fingered the blue-black opening. Her fingers probed and swirled over the slick rock until the men couldn’t hide their discomfort.

The CVS girl pulled her jersey over her head to feel the sun. She was wearing an underwire bra and its ribs rode up until her breasts were sliced across, making four even lumps out of two. She tugged the bra back in place and threw her shirt at Bell. He caught the jersey before it fell into the water. Christine looked at Miller to gauge his reaction, or she was trying to find her own response. She unbuttoned her top button and lifted her shirt off. Bell thought she was just trying to keep up.

He didn’t want to stare at her and he studied the water. A large bank of waves was coming in and it would cause
some action at Spouting Rock. It was so utterly familiar, these procedures. He saw the undertow pull back and the surface flatten. For a few seconds, nothing. The swell ascended in frothy notches, wobbled and shuddered in a dead halt before beginning its advance. Building a high curl, its wall looked green and corrugated as a carport awning. Bell thought of the drowned woman, her beaded dress, variegated and marbled like the rocks, as if she herself might have broken off this reef and washed onto First Beach.

“Here comes,” Bell shouted, pulling his sister to her feet. The sea crashed into the trough, smacking the planes of rock like pistol shots. The level ascended, rising up until the full force of the wave exploded from the crevice where Christine had been seated. The spray shot up twelve feet, feathered left and right in different tugs of wind. The girls squealed as the men yanked them out of its circle. Miller touched his hip to see if his insulin pump was wet. It had been spared. The CVS girl saw it; she recognized the box. “Hey, I’ve seen one of those at work,” she told Miller. “Is that one of those electronic blood-pressure kits, is that it? Have you got hypertension?”

Miller started to explain to the girl. He walked her over to the craggy shale ladders. He put his arm around her bare neck, letting his wrist swivel on her shoulder as he talked. He strummed her hair away from her eyes and pulled her close, into his medical confession.

“He’s telling her his symptoms,” Christine said.

“What are his symptoms?”

“Weakness, blurred vision. He could go blind, you know.”

“He just looks lovesick, if you ask me,” Bell said.

Christine watched her boyfriend with the other girl. Christine was smiling. Bell admired this. He didn’t feel like walking over there to claim the CVS girl for himself or to get Miller back on her account. Christine walked out on a tiny natural bridge to another huge boulder. Bell followed her out. She was reciting lines when he came up beside her. The wind erased her words and she turned around in the other direction. She faced her brother.

“They’re carrying a thing among them and there’s water dripping out of it and leaving a track by the big stones.”

“Don’t you know your lines by now?” Bell had to yell.

“Leaving a track by the big stones,”
Christine repeated.

“Must you always—”

She was laughing. “
The big stones
—just like these,” she said. She toed the granite with the tip of her sneaker.

He watched her profile, the wind lifted her weft of blond hair until it flared level.

“What are we doing here with these people?” Bell asked her. “These geeks? What are we doing here? With them?”

“Oh, Christ,” she said, looking out at the water. She was trying not to listen.

He squared before her. He put his arms around her waist, crossing his fists at the small of her back. He cinched his wrists tighter and held her without the imprint of his hands. She was beneath his chin. “What are we doing?” he said.

“Meaning?” she said. Her eyes looked startled, the pupils swirled open, but she kept her face level, steadied. The slight translucent down at her hairline was electrified by the sun; her eyelashes blazed like tiny welders’ arcs.

She bent her knees and crawled out from under his
arms. She laid her palms flat against his biceps and shoved him lightly across the rock. She told him, “You’re just getting adjusted to home. Shit. Everything’s a three-ring—that’s what you used to say.”

Miller was calling to them. He was having some sort of panic spasms and his arms windmilled in two directions.

Bell went down to where he was standing.

“She’s fucking with me, man,” Miller said. “She’s took my insulin pump and won’t let me have it.”

Christine descended carefully from the boulder. She reached under her shorts and tugged the elastic leg of her panties, letting it snap. “So you took it off? Are you supposed to take it off? What happens to your blood?” she said.

“I was showing it to her,” Miller said.

Christine said, “Since when do you disconnect it?”

“Wake up, Chrissie,” Bell said.

“What do you mean, wake up?” She looked at her brother and back to Miller. She saw Miller was wearing his Nike sweats inside out.

Miller said, “It was nothing, Christine. Just nothing.”

“Not worth the effort?” Bell said.

Miller didn’t protest the assumption.

“Since when do you take it off for that?” Christine said.

Bell examined his sister. Then he looked for the CVS girl and saw her leaning against the car in the beach parking lot. Her arms were crossed tightly at her bosom, the way girls fold their arms when they’re ready to go home.

“Is that your gizmo? Right there?” Bell pointed to a rocky ledge where the girl had propped the insulin pump. He lifted it off the granite niche and tossed it to Miller. It fell in a weightless arc and landed in the water. The little
box drifted back and forth in one of the frothy gullies between land and sea.

“Nice,” Miller said. “That’s just wonderful. Just what am I dealing with here? Do you have the hard cash to replace something like that? That’s what I’m asking—”

“Did we ask you to get undressed?” Bell told him.

Christine looked over at the CVS girl and waved. The girl knew it was a snub; she shifted her legs and looked in the other direction.

“Maybe you can get the box,” Christine told Miller.

“That’s crazy,” Miller told them. “I’ve got insurance. Let’s just travel. I’m ready.”

“Tell you what. I’ll race you for the cost of that thing,” Bell said. “Swim out, touch the mooring at Bailey’s, turn around, come back. Ten minutes. If you win, I pay for the machine. Even-steven. Time us, Christine.” He pulled his jersey over his head and the wind snapped it until he wadded it down.